


mysterious ways

by aMassiveDisappointment (BadOldWest)



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Medieval, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Catholicism, F/M, Joan of Arc - Freeform, and SMUT, we got two aus at once just deal, we're just checking all our bases here
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-23
Updated: 2017-12-17
Packaged: 2019-01-04 13:58:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 18,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12170274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BadOldWest/pseuds/aMassiveDisappointment
Summary: When he gets home from wherever he was going, mind racing -as if he could think of anything else after the girl with wings- he looks through some of his mother’s old boxes and finds a book of saints.He would flip through it as a child, and the messy brown hair was familiar, and there’s a martyred Jyn that catches his eye. Her green eyes were painted wide and clear, looking at the sky and clutching a cross around her neck. Patron Saint of Quests. She was burned at the stake at the age of 23. In 1497.But that couldn’t be right, because she yanked him back onto the sidewalk before a bus flattened him that very afternoon.Cassian Andor is visited by Jyn, a somewhat flawed Guardian Angel and Patron Saint of Quests. Little does he know what she's been chosen to guide him through, or the lives he's lived with her before.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anothersadsong](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anothersadsong/gifts).



> So. Somewhat a clusterfuck that no one (except Lauren) asked for. I really wanted to do Jyn and Joan of Arc and got really caught up in two separate approaches to Catholic mythology (researching this was so fun). Don't worry, it's not too preachy, and besides, Rogue One is a story of redemption and renewed faith. It totally works.

2017 A.D

Something behind him at the crosswalk hauls him back by the collar. 

He glances behind him, it’s not there, but as he’s being jerked, a bus rushes from seemingly out of nowhere. Though his periphery is somewhat muted by his phone -he was looking at it for directions. 

His heart is racing at the breeze from the fast-moving bus, and wants to thank whatever grabbed him, but even as he turns to face the busy street, no one was close enough to have been his rescuer. 

On instinct, his lips start to form the words of the Hail Mary, like his mother taught him. 

A sandal slaps down from the rooftop above. He glances up. 

A cross-legged girl with massive feathered wings glares down at him. Her arms are crossed. 

“Don’t thank Mary,” she says stoutly, her chin quivering, and pushes herself up off the roof to soar away, her wings fluttering rapidly like a startled chicken.

“Who do I thank?” he yells after her, and that’s about when he figures out no one else saw her, and everyone at the cafe across the street thinks he’s crazy. 

When he gets home from wherever he was going, mind racing -as if he could think of anything else after the girl with wings- he looks through some of his mother’s old boxes and finds a book of saints. 

He would flip through it as a child, and the messy brown hair was familiar, and there’s a martyred _ Jyn _ that catches his eye. Her green eyes were painted wide and clear, looking at the sky and clutching a cross around her neck. Patron Saint of Quests. She was burned at the stake at the age of 23. In 1497.

But that couldn’t be right, because she yanked him back onto the sidewalk before a bus flattened him that very afternoon. 

 

1496 A.D

She was small, and quick, and silver. She was like the little fish that bit at his toes when he went in the river back home. Blood smeared on his face, he remembered the tickle, and the smile that came was familiar to that moment, watching her. 

But this wasn’t home, this was battle. And she wasn’t an animal; she was divine.

Her armor flashed despite the cloudy sky, he was glad for it with all the smoke, he could find her as she fought onwards. Leading the charge. 

He would follow her to hell and back, but he knew he would never find her there. 

And he deserved hell. 

In passing on the way to his tent, she caught his wrist in her small white hand. 

“I pray for your soul, Captain.”

It was too much to ask to be forgiven. He left that to her. 

He placed a hand over hers. He’d kneel in the mud if he knew she wouldn’t call him a fool. 

“The only virtue of protecting this soul is in knowing that it’s yours.”

He could only pray that they lived. 

 

2017

His apartment is filled with a pregnant silence, and he keeps looking up, half-expecting to find St. Jyn with her wings tangled in his rafters. 

He digs through the book of Saints, but it’s for children, so there’s not much deeper he can get beyond girl warrior. Divine visions. Burned. 

But the dusty box he obtained it from yields another find; a pink veladora candle with St. Jyn’s likeness etched in the glass. Again, burning alive, gazing fearlessly up at the sky. For such a strong woman there certainly was painstaking care in depicting her at her lowest.

His lapsed faith had always been in part from a lack of intentional irony in Catholicism. 

The wick was furred with ash, and he almost remembered the smell to it, not heavily scented but in the air, from when he was a child.

He touches a finger to the glass, and curiously, carried it in a gentle hand to his kitchen where he lit it. Once the glass is no longer cradled in his palm, the room grows remarkably cool. 

“At least it’s not the Virgin Mary.”

Rafters. He senses it and his eyes follow. 

“What is it with you and the Virgin Mary? Did she catch you jumping the pearly gates or something?”

“The Virgin Mary didn’t rip you out of oncoming traffic. I did.”

Jyn, in celestial, winged form, stretches across the length of a ceiling rafter, a relatively sleepy, cherubic pose from such a pissy-looking angel. 

“You’re awfully proud for a former Saint.”

“I don’t have to be perfect,” she tosses her gold-entwined curls, and that seems to detract from her argument when she has large, white  _ wings _ stretching out of her back. 

“I thought that was the job description.”

Her nostrils flare. He is noticing that she has rather un-angelic quirks “Just because someone is venerated by the church doesn’t mean they lived an entire life without sin. None of us would be capable of what we’ve done without having sinned first.”

“You were pretty young when you died.”

She still has the gold tone cast over her, lit by a divine spotlight in the center of the room. “So?”

“I’m just wondering what you did.”

It feels odd, talking to someone out loud in his apartment. He can’t remember the last time that happened. It makes him say more, say things he shouldn’t. 

“Not telling,” she pulls slightly back from her condescending lean towards him.

She’s scandalized. He smirks in amusement. Cassian leans back in his seat, assuming that if she was a vessel of God, she’d be good about forgiving him: “Was it sex?”

She rolls her eyes. 

“You humans have been so prudish since the Victorian era. Like  _ you’re _ the first generation to discover it.”

“Doesn’t the bible say something about angels being chaste?”

“The bible says a lot of things, and it depends on which testament you read. And Saints were human who did good things. That doesn’t mean my life was exempt from sin, just that those sins were forgiven.”

“You keep saying Saint, but you have wings, and saved my life. I thought you were an angel.”

And he winces at how corny a pick-up line that sounds like. 

She shrugs. “I’m a lot of things. Nothing is impossible.”

“So,” he gets up to go to his fridge, pulling a beer out. He holds it up to her, kind of wanting to see those wings in action if she swoops down to grab it. She waves him off. He cracks it open for himself, “Patron Saint of Quests, and somewhat Guardian Angel. What were you saving  _ me _ for?”

Her shorn, chin length hair seems to quiver. “I assume you’re referring to your past mistakes.”

He grins at that, toasting her with his corona bottle. “I’m not exactly a good man.”

“What do you think matters more?” she challenges, finally righteous in the way he was expecting. “Your actions, or your soul?”

All this religion was making him think of his mother, and he didn’t want her to force him into that state of mind. 

“Don’t get philosophical when I drink. What does the Saint of Quests want with someone like me?”

She sits up on the rafter, her bare feet dangling down. Those pure white wings were funny on such an angry-looking thing. 

“I can’t tell you.”

“Would that ruin it? Is the quest inside me all along?”

“No. I can’t tell you until you go to confession.”

Her hand flicks in the direction of the veladora, and a gust of breeze burns the flame out. She vanishes, and his apartment is empty. He is truly alone. 

He hasn’t gone to confession since before his mother died. He doesn’t know where, reasonably, he would start. 

 

1495

The first campaign, there were doubters. Jyn had insisted she could pass for a boy, a page or a new recruit, but Cassian had declined the attempt, keeping her on a short leash with everyone having full knowledge even though her hair was shorn shoulder-length like a youth. The God-Chosen girl kept busy and to herself. She was steady in her task, deep in prayer, and indifferent to her keeper. 

The first time she took a hard hit, from some enemy scouts, was the first time he saw her faith waver. There was something fearless in her eyes was she faced her attacker, something unafraid of death, but there was a regret tightening her jaw. A sword cracked against her armor, bloodying part of her waist, though nothing vital was cut, he helped her up when it was all over and guided her to safety. She wanted to walk it off. He sat her at his feet from his post on the south border while the other troops rode off. 

“Have you ever killed anyone before?” he asked, setting her down against the wall.

She glared up at him. She was a rather saintly thing, a convent face on the body of a barrack-dweller. He was surprised she had one sin, wrath, to spare for him. 

Clearly, despite her capacity for anger, the answer was yes, and that was eating at her. He wiped a bloody hand off on his trousers before pulling his bow off his back. One scout was getting away, he could see in the distance. She was still frozen stiff and bleeding. 

“I like to hear someone talk as I line up a shot,” he said, snapping the string into its proper place on his bow. “Seeing as we have an enemy scout in the distance, and I have one shot I have to make, can you talk me through it?”

“What do I say?”

She gingerly touched her hand to her wound and hissed at the blood on her fingers. 

He was trying to get her talking for her sake, not his. 

“What don’t you tell me about God choosing you? I’m assuming your version has less angels in it than the one they tell at vespers.”

She chuckled, looking a sheepish when she smirked at him. It was maybe the first time he saw her genuinely smile, without the beatific falseness he knew the swarm of priests around her were insisting upon. To look more feminine, so the men would like her more. 

“He spoke to me in the form of my father. He told me what had to be done. I believed. I still believe.”

He said nothing, instead, lined up the shot. Her voice was soothing him. 

“Your father?”

“Yes. He was in a blue glow, and he seemed...sad. Yet happy? It was so beautiful, I wept.”

“Sounds Holy.”

He took a deep breath before he let the arrow fly. 

Jyn was silent. There was something to watching him kill someone. It wasn’t righteous, as she had tried to do with her sword. He seemed tired and frustrated and lost. 

“You don’t believe me,” she observed. 

Her keeper shrugged. “I think you believe what you saw. That’s enough for me.”

It was still condescending, and her nostrils flared. 

“My father has entrusted me with a sacred duty, and you scoff-”

He hauled her up by the arm onto the perch he had knelt on to draw his bow. He lifted the hem of her tunic, her tight stomach was bloody. He dropped to his knees to stitch up the cut. She grimaced, her muscles tensing and jumping under his hands. She tried to help, but her hands were shaking, and he remembered she was just a girl, unused to fighting. He, as kindly as he could, instructed her to hold her tunic out of the way, and he used his hands and sometimes held the needle in his teeth when the task was over-complicated by the location. 

Her skin was pale, and cold from the air and the wet on the battlefield. 

“Why do you follow me then, if you don’t believe?”

“I’ll try anything to make this war shorter.”

He shrugged up at her, biting the thread to cut it. She flinched when his teeth grazed her ribs. 

“You trust a girl to save you a few months war? I’m not getting this done quickly, I’m trying to do this right.”

“You had a calling. It’s precious. Some of us didn’t have that kind of luxury that brought us to this war.”

“I lost  _ my father-” _

The archer shook his head at her. “My village was burned to the ground by the Empire. I want that to stop happening to other people.”

Her face cooled to the pale image of the Madonna he had seen trained there for weeks. She stood, placing a tender hand on his breast. “I am sorry for your loss,” she said, tenderly and with feeling, but she might as well have been greeting an orphaned child, not the man he was, and he resented her for it. 

He shoved her away with a growl. 

“I see what you really are,” he bent low to her face. “You’re only human, Jyn.”

Her hand withdrew, as did her beatific expression. 

She started to climb down the steps of the wall to find a horse to get her back to camp.

He gripped the blood-soaked cloth in his fist, contemplating shooting an arrow at her and her smart mouth. 

He could sell the bloody rag for a pretty penny amongst the tents of desperate men. Their Martyr had bled out a relic. 

The first time he had seen a saint’s bones in a chapel miles away from home that his mother had asked to be brought to on her deathbed, he had learned a valuable lesson; on the inside, Saints were just bones. 


	2. Chapter 2

He does not go to confession. He doesn’t really do anything other than laze around his apartment, but now it feels like work because he’s actively ignoring the elephant in the room. It is obvious little St. Jyn is hovering around. The first night his fourth beer gets swatted out of his hand, flung to the floor, and he knows he’s dealing with a very passive aggressive divine figure as he cleans up the glass.

He doesn’t wonder how to bring her back, because he’s more concerned with getting her to leave him alone. 

But clearly, his life is precious, because she keeps coming back. 

_ “Accidents” _ he’d ignored his whole life become eerily close calls instead. The bus was just the start. At work when he gets under the bar to finally clean it as Chirrut asked, he nearly opens his wrist on a forgotten snapped wineglass stem. Something wrenches his arm up at the last second. 

It wasn’t always little. He had been branded as a bit of a miracle in combat. He’d outlived four squadrons during his long career as a soldier, before he had to give that up for his sanity. He didn’t want to search for her fingerprints on those close calls. That was a long time ago. 

He gets distracted on his train ride home, nearly falling off the platform after a few too many beers (he works at a bar, who is he to stay sober for it?) and again, she yanks him back by the collar. He can just tell, standing with both feet on the ground, people around him glaring over the near accident -another drunk falls on the tracks- and her judgement warms his back. 

There’s a homeless man on the platform screaming about the day of revelation. A tin cup shakes. The apocalypse is threatened. It echoes in his ears as he climbs the tiled steps. Apparently, it’s close. 

It isn’t his job to stop it. No matter what some haloed girl tells him. 

She follows him home, closely, and he foggily addresses her for the first time, in his head. His heart is still racing from that initial feeling of falling. 

_ How do you keep showing up? _

**I can show up a lot of ways. When you’re praying. Lighting my candle that you have. Getting yourself into trouble. You’ve kept me pretty close by over that.**

The answer is more concrete than he’s ever received through prayer.

_ How do I get you to leave? _

**Finish the quest.**

He rolls his eyes.

_ How are you sure I’m the right guy? _

**I recognize your soul.**

She descends from the night sky at his side as he turns a corner onto an empty street. Her wings are lifelessly hanging behind her, furled and cautious. Her human steps are shaky and she has to jog to keep up with him. But still her head bobs at his shoulder, keeping pace in the night.  

She takes his hand, and he stops walking.

“There, we can at least get you on step one.”

She extends a finger. He follows her pointing with his eyes. 

This section of town is red-halogen-lit against ancient brick. She looks completely out of place and somehow perfectly right as she’s there. 

In the distance, there’s a red-neon-light crucifix near a high tile roof. She steps towards it, but once that direction is chosen, she almost overshoots her destination by walking to a strip club a block over. As though the two red hazes are the same thing. He catches her by the elbow. Not even he has the heart to let her just waltz in there looking for God, thought the image does make him smirk. 

He’d like to see her embarrass herself in the contents of the club, he can already see bared limbs posing suggestively in the window. It was generous to call this a stripclub. Strip clubs didn’t advertise in the streets. This was a place that was marketing the privilege of  _ touching. _

“You don’t want to go in there.”

She’s hooded in this red light, and looks ahead at where he’s leading her away from. Her eyes seem more shiny and liquid in the glow, or maybe it’s the misunderstanding there. She looks back at the club. She has to know about these places, if she’s seen so much. Women dance in slick, dark windows, each on their own booth, each luring in their own catch. Jyn grows still at his arm, her skin looking marble in the single color. Her eyes are dark. 

A blonde in the window catches Cassian’s eyes and bends her legs, her hands braced on her crossed knees, her breasts pushing forwards and she blows him a kiss and a wink. He recognises her. There are just things you need to feel human after a war.

She has a plaid skirt on, and a stiff-looking cropped blouse that is bound by a single, stretched button.

“What is she wearing?” Jyn asks, both of them watching the window. 

He wrinkles his nose.  Catholic schoolgirl uniform.”

Finally getting a rise out of her, she sputters. Her head shakes from side to side and she sighs, looking down at the sidewalk. 

“We’re right by a  _ church,” _ she sounds sad. Like a deck of card has spilled and she has to gather them all up. 

It isn’t just indecency, or sexuality, he can kind of understand. A sadness radiates out of the club; the red and the half-lidded eyes and the loose limbs. There’s nothing hard-won and faith-driven to be had in there. It was a place to be easy. Already, he knows it is the place least like Jyn imaginable. 

He shakes his head, pulling her towards her destination. “At this time of night, church and  _ that _ are the only thing a personal stays awake for.”

Her fringe dips down her forehead, covering her eyes. He tries to goad her out of her sadness. There’s something like empathy in her expression, and it’s depressing him. He doesn’t want to think too hard. And what is that? Guilt? He could kill her for raising that in him. He’d tamped the ability to be ashamed a long time ago.

“I thought you were so wise to our petty human sexuality. Feeling skittish now?”

“Sex isn’t something you buy in a window. It’s beautiful,” she folds her hands in front of herself. “We give you something divine to appreciate in life, and you put it in a shopwindow. I don’t know why humans cheapen it.”

Divine? He may have been persuaded to convert to whatever was asked of him by a few girls sucking his cock, but this is hardly something he admits clear-headed. She's finally looking at him like he's the one who doesn't get it. 

“Well, I guess I can’t do your quest if I didn’t wait until marriage. Too bad.”

She glares at him. She seems to always be making that face, for someone with alleged faith in him. 

“That’s not what I meant. Honestly, you humans get hung up on the strangest of footnotes in a sacred text. You now have a modern era of birth control and disease prevention; how are those not miracles you’ve learned to adapt to? And in the grand scheme of things,  _ do you think we really care about who you had consensual sex with if you’ve done a lot of good things?” _

He sort of gapes at her. He wants to haul a nun from his schooldays forward and make Jyn explain all that again, just to see her drop dead on the spot.

"Divine, you say? Is that what heaven is like."

She flushed, rosy-cheek like one the the cherubs in his book of saints. 

"That's our gift for you. Just humans. We don't feel things the way you do."

He chooses to avoid the theological discussion and dip it back to his area of expertise; “Sounds like you really miss sex, Saint Jyn.” 

He offers her a smile not unlike the feel of the one radiating from the dancers in the window.

There's no answer, just a sadness in her eyes. 

He swallows, somehow finding himself pressing on; "It sounds like you miss being human, Jyn. And you want to taste that again."

Jyn stares at him, her face blank. She sighs, and vanishes up the steps  into the church. 

He stuffs his hands in his pockets. She’s made him feel guilty again. Typical Catholic. He looks into the church. It’s illuminated. It looks like an AA meeting is convening towards the altar. Jyn looks over her shoulder back at him, and rings for the priest. Then she vanishes. 

He lets his head fall back in frustration, cursing at the stars. 

She had saved his life tonight. He owes her a favor. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Cassian is a massive dick in this chapter (yay redemption arcs!!!)

**2017**

Other than the AA meeting, the church is empty but for two men are seated next to each other on a pew. One is focused in prayer, the other is bored looking. Once she saw that Cassian had followed her in, Jyn had turned her back on him and leapt through the large stained glass window at the altar; he flinched when he saw it, but she merely melted through instead of destroying the whole thing.

Cassian takes a chair by the door, not interested in the prayer and recovery happening around him. He almost pulls his phone out, but there’s something about the space that existed to him before phones that keeps his hand from extracting it from his pocket.

He’s not alone with God for long, he’s greeted by a warm, light hand on his arm. The priest is younger than expected, long hair bound in a knot at the base of his skull; quiet and stubbly and all eyes. Cassian suspects Jyn wanted this specific one for him; a man his own age, a companion of sorts, easier to talk to than this pale little thing with impossible assessing eyes 

“What brings you to confession?”

Cassian scratches the back of his head, a little at a loss. “A girl.”

Father Rook smiles gently. “You’d be surprised how common that is.”

 

**1942**

This time he was only a boy. He wasn’t really anyone until he found himself on that gurney, bloody and blinded and calling for help. 

He asked to see his mother, his mother was back in Italy, and he wouldn’t be going home there ever again. 

“A priest has been called for your last rights,” Draven’s voice tells him, but it’s far away. 

The tent was surrounded by night, so when his closed eyes caught a warm white glow he was confused, and a dry warmth surrounded him despite the sweat and blood soaking him.

Someone takes his hands; they are cool as snow against his fevered skin.

“You’ve been so brave.”

A kiss is pressed to his palm, and the pain numbs, and seemingly melts away. Wild brown hair and a slightly self-deprecating smile. 

“Who are you?”

He was nineteen. It wasn’t time yet. It wasn’t supposed to be.

“I’m sorry. There just wasn’t time to know. We will always have next time.”

“Where am I going?”

_ “Home.” _

 

**1496**

“There’s witchcraft there,” a low voice rose like embers from the fire they were huddled around. Jyn was eating quietly, alone but for another priest and his follower. They sat a few feet away in the dark. Chirrut didn’t need the light and Jy and Baze would sacrifice more for the company. 

Her eyes darted up, but the blind priest at her side lowered a hand over one of hers, instinctively knowing, and the urge to turn the other cheek reined her. If only for a moment. 

The Captain was silent by the side of the dissenter, but he glanced up at her once the words traveled, his eyes flashing with guilt. She looked away. She had been allowed to tag along on this campaign, and the last, speak at the occasional vespers. She was by no means leading an army, and maybe never would be allowed to. She was graced by predictions that had yet be ruled as more than lucky guesses. It would be too much power to give her, the war council had reasoned, so she was used for those who needed a religious cause but not a military leader. Cassian could tell it bothered her, she was not there to bring people to God, but to fight to extend God’s will, for freedom. If people listened to her regardless, she would be satisfied with victory. 

“Crazy girl dressed as a soldier and harassed the leaders of her village for months, campaigning and shouting for them to join the cause. I don’t know if it was God’s plan that forced their hands or annoyance.”

He kept his eyes on her face, still silent in this conversation. Jyn glanced up at him. Her eyes told him silence didn’t hurt; but it also wasn’t enough.

“Her father was with the Empire to begin with, and she says a vision from him was what did it, the traitor-”

Jyn was on her feet, shaking the smart-mouthed-soldier by the collar.

“True confidence in your beliefs would mean a tolerance of mine,” she growled, and Cassian dragged her back by the arm. Plates dropped to the ground, which meant he would have to go back for them or find new ones before the next meal, but he just wanted her out of the line of fire. She had to sleep in a tent beside of all of these men. He didn’t want one taking revenge when the lights were out.

 

2017

Cassian’s hands were shaking when he sat in the confessional. It was so much worse having  _ seen _ the young priest in person first; no anonymity, a tentative respect formed. 

“How long has it been since your last confession?”

He sees the shadow of Father Rook shift from the other side of the heavy grate on the window. A person is there, and he doesn’t like it. He’d rather declare this into empty space. He doesn’t want it heard. 

“A long time,” he answers vaguely, clearing his throat.

“What would you like to confess?”

Cassian coughs, stalling. “I was a soldier.”

There’s a nod that is caught in shadow. “That is a difficult moral position to be put in. How does your conscience feel about that time in your life?”

“I’m trying to feel like the things I did mattered. I don’t think they did,” he rubs his sweaty palms on the thighs of his pants, “I killed a lot of people.”

It’s a concrete fact, but it’s also one that dodges the levels of his sins. He never wanted to think about this again. He wants to seizes Jyn by her slender upper arms and shake her. His grief manifests in violence, his one act of clear conscience was in suppressing that destruction by not addressing that demon.

“In war?”

“Yes.”

“Did you find it to be for a worthy cause?”

“When I enlisted I did. Sometimes… not everything I did I can say I’m proud of.”

“I can’t assign rosaries for that kind of guilt.”

Cassian laughs, his breath finally returning to him. “I’m not sure I’d ever do them, because I’m not sure I deserve forgiveness. Or redemption.”

“You said a girl sent you here?”

_ Something like that. _

“Yes, Father.”

“Then she seems to think you do. As does God. If you’re able to do what you had to in war, if you want to seek absolution, you may have to do just as much. It doesn’t mean it’s impossible.”

Father Rook exhibits some of God’s mercy by keeping his advice short, and Cassian is back in the cool night sooner than expected. 

He’s supposed to feel cleansed after confession, and in a way, he could say he is; lysol dipped and blinded, stumbling around with no bearings. 

He’s not supposed to be angry, but he is, he’s just made that way, and he’s not the type to scrub through the things he’s done to try to make some meaning or sense in it.

He can’t go home and go to sleep because the dam is cracked and if he closes his eyes it could all overflow. He can hear voices in his head; and they are not divine.

Jyn lands at his side, her hand on his arm. Her smile is gentle. “There. That wasn’t so hard-”

The wings at her shoulder blades give an awkward little shake as he moves.

He pulls away, and back into the red light. She’s confused, but the window is his lighthouse, the way the neon cross was hers just under an hour ago. It feels like a lifetime since they were at the subway station and she saved him from falling on the tracks. 

“Cassian…”

“I never asked for this.”

She trots alongside him, pulling at his hand. “Don’t, please.”

He’s at the window. There’s a target he has his eyes on, the single black button that’s keeping a straining blouse from popping. He enters the red glow after he receives a wink of confirmation. 

There’s a bar where the transactions are arranged. The place is closing down for the night, but he’s been there before, and if the girl he chose is okay with it, they can go back to his place. Jyn remains at his side as he orders a drink. 

“I don’t know if you remember much about sex, Jyn, but I will give you credit, it is something like seeing God.”

Her eyes are cold. She keeps her judgement silent. 

“Can you have sex anymore? Are you some old-testament kind of-”

“It would kill you,” she shoots back.

He raises his eyebrows, eying her over his drink. “Oh really?”

“It would burn your skin off,” she grits out, “Because it’s not meant to happen. Not between us. My kind and your kind.”

No one else can see her. Her face is now red-saturation, like a sticky red dye had been poured over her. He imagines he looks the same in the light. He leans close. Her lip trembles. 

“I want to burn.”

Arms slide around his neck from behind. There’s a girl’s chin hooked over his shoulder. Her hair brushes his cheek. It smells too sweet. 

He hooks an arm around her, hauling her towards his front so Jyn has to move out of the way. Serves her right for meddling into the person he was, the person he was never going to change from being. Vice was a demand, virtue was a whisper. He was a soldier. He answered the demands first.

“What’s your name?” he asks the blonde.

“Angel,” she whispers. 

Jyn doesn’t look at her. Only at him.

“What’s a night with you like, Angel?”

She smiles. “Heaven.”

Feathers whip across his lap as Jyn vanishes. Like he thought, Catholicism and Irony didn’t mix.

 

**1496**

After months fighting at her side, he found his doubting heart was fiery again. 

She’d once carried him across a battlefield, refusing to leave him. Just draped his arm over her shoulders and dragged him on, despite there being no chance he was going to make it. 

“Leave me, Jyn.”

“Don’t lose hope,” she glanced up at the sky, and he had a faint feeling she was seeing her father there. Her body was not meant to carry his born on her back, but somehow, she walked on.

He blacked out around that point, but he woke with her at his bedside, praying. Her lips were moving, her eyes closed, and her lashes fanned out against her cheek. 

He rolled towards her, a faint smile gracing his lips. “You might have something, then. For me to have lived.”

The sarcasm on his lips was not lost on her.

She glanced up at him, dark circles bruising under her eyes. To his shock, she smiled.

“You’re an idiot.”

He was  _ her _ idiot, though it was never said aloud. From that moment on. His role of her watchdog was overshadowed in his loyalty by his hidden compassion; a pet instead of a hound. She kept quiet about her feelings about this. In her opinion, he guided her more than she guided him. From battle to battle. Prayer to prayer. Her bloodiest kill, opponent begging for mercy, he lifted her by the elbow and helped her walk it off without a single word. She just closed her eyes and trusted he wouldn’t let her trip on anything, the air cold and biting, her lips blistering dry. 

She kept licking them, when she looked at him. Chewing them when they got a rare night off and went for a drink at a rowdy tavern. Jyn was quiet, passing for a boy but certainly not a man. She kept her hands in plain sight and watched her friends partner off with real women, women the way men wanted, in dresses and flowing hair and light, airy laughter. 

He went with women, in the early months. Cast her an abashed smile as one dropped to his side with a fresh mug for him, something sweet on her lips, and would usually be led up the stairs for the real reason most soldiers left camp. Jyn watched. He enjoyed her curiosity. 

“Why do you go?” she chewed a piece of bread, because she went along every time for the uproar to her chaste life and for the opportunity to get a good meal. 

He raised his eyebrows, waving a hand towards the girl waiting at the base of the stairs. 

“Because, Jyn. It’s life, what happens up there. What we’re fighting for, isn’t it?”

Jyn had those eyes on him, those pit-like black centers that would catch him by the ankles if he stepped too close. She licked her lips.

“I don’t see it that way,” she mused, looking down at her drink. “I just think that it’s an indulgence, and-”

He finally set his full attention on her.

“You have your divinity, I have mine. And it’s trapped between her legs right now, so if you’ll excuse me to go pray…”

She shook her head. There was something knit between her brow, a certain hurt like an anointing ash. She didn't laugh at his jokes as much anymore. That made him stay, made him linger until she at least _smiled_  again. He needed her to.

She looks up at him with a frail curiosity.

“Why does it feel good?”

She’d seen the basic mechanics of the act. She was raised on a farm, and boundaries of camp tents made for little secrets when her neighbors brought home a sweetheart  _ (or other) _ . She knew the noises to it, but found them vulgar. Jyn was not a stranger to the occasional kiss, but most in the past few years had been at her feet or hands, in displays of worship. 

He was quiet. 

“Well,” he cleared his throat. “For a man, it’s nice to have a soft body against yours, when you’ve been in battle so long.”

Jyn nodded. “I’ve been in battle too.”

“Yes…”

“I’m just wondering, would I feel the same? Or do you need to learn to...”

He dug the heel of his hand over his mouth, a flush forming on his face, like he had been caught doing something he shouldn’t have been. 

“I’d imagine you feel as you should.”

“I’m so scarred though,” she wasn’t looking at him, but at the grain on the table. “My skin has gotten tougher since we started.”

There was a vulnerability to this she had never exposed in something outside this war. That someone would want to touch her when all of this was over. Someone like him.

He nodded, glancing away. He wasn’t supposed to be thinking of her skin. “It’s inside you, Jyn. That would be soft. And warm.”

“Warm?”

“Yes.”

Her eyes went distant, and something colored her cheeks: maybe it was the first awareness of that warmth where it now was. They couldn’t look away from each other, and despite his lack of faith in her higher power, he knew he would ruin her and needed to restrain himself from doing so. She wet her lips. He just stared at her mouth, because it kept him from searching for meaning in her eyes. 

She cleared her throat: “You would like that?”

The Captain didn’t breathe. 

“Yes, should I ever be so blessed.”

There was a flush on her cheeks that almost had him haul her upstairs. But he was nowhere near close deserving that. And so he did the thing that would drive a wedge between them for weeks; walking away from a chance for something better while taking steps towards the thing he neither wanted nor needed.

He treated it like his cross to bear, his great sacrifice, but h e did not go to bed alone. Jyn did. 

 

**2017**

He stumbles out of his room, drunk and seeking water, and she's at his kitchen table. 

Jyn’s eyes slide to his bedroom door, an occupied space. It’s the first time he had seen her gaze so direct, where usually, it was like she was watching everything from far away even when she stood close. She gestures a limp hand at the lit candle.

He takes one look at it and nearly buries his face in his hands.

He was so drunk when he got home that he lit it to...set the mood. He really was a bastard. 

For an angel, she makes it no secret she thinks so too in that moment. 

“Was this the best time to call me?”

The breathing of his guest is steady and soft, like the bed itself is a beating heart. Jyn lays her hands flat on the table. Her brow is arched in a subtle anger, like she’s trying to be better than it while still being better than _him._ Her cheek is quite not subtly  _ turned _ in a measured tolerance. 

For the first time, sex has felt like a sin. Not because of the ring he never put on anyone’s finger. Not the reasons he had been told by priests and nuns. But from the mild judgement on her face, like she expected him to do better. 

She didn’t expect anything from him other than  _ more than this. _

“I suppose you’ll make me go back to confession again. Sort of besides the point, if I can’t keep a slate clean for long enough for you to get the quest delivered.”

Jyn’s large eyes tell him she knows that he’s pushing, and it bothers him even more to see himself caught in such a childish was to leave her in his dust. 

“Once we get passed how obviously you're avoiding this quest, it all depends on how you look at it,” she says plainly. He hates her neutral expression.

“Are you justifying philandering, evil, soliciting prostitutes? Jyn, are you sure it’s God that sent you?”

She is quiet, staring out the window. She is more grounded in his world than she has ever seemed before. 

“Everything is complicated when you apply morals. I’m not here to tell you things are bad.”

“Tell me how this is complicated.”

She clears her throat, finding her voice; “Obviously I’m not happy you went for the easy way to find human connection. But it was human connection you sought. You bought sex, but it was with money you had earned through your own labor, and you didn’t  _ take _ sex from someone in a one-sided transaction. However, that prostitute may have been desperate and you took advantage of a system that exploits her. In the long term, that’s destructive. However, it was an exchange of money for services rendered, and she was paid, and because of the situation she was in, she probably needed the money you gave her. So there could be short-term solutions that aren’t exactly  _ evil _ in every way. Maybe she’s supporting people on that money. Even if it only supports herself, it’s what she was looking for. Cassian, people are involved in these questions. There’s never one answer in theses things. And even if you think I’m so sanctimonious all the time, you have never given me the capacity to forgive you.”

Her words crawl inside his ear like a terrible spider, they take up residence in his mind that makes him panic. He physically flinches away, pretending to be able to ignore them;

“I went to confession. I asked for forgiveness. Now what.”

She shrugs. “Communion.”

Cassian digs the heels of his hands into his closed eyes. “I- _ are you kidding? _ ”

She shrugs again, her ability to sugar-coat clearly dead on the floor of this apartment. “These are sacraments. You grew up Catholic. This shouldn’t surprise you. There are steps. It takes  _ work. _ ”

He pulls another beer from the fridge. “You exhaust me, you know that? How do you know I’ll even take up this quest when you give it to me. I am sick of fighting other people’s wars.”

She looks detached for a moment in the way he hates, like her patience will always win in the end.

But then her hands flutters in front of her face, like she’s waving something away. 

“Sorry,” she backs away from the counter, the tips of her wings dragging on the floor. “Sorry.”

“What now?”

He should be kinder. Instead, he slinks down in his chair defensively. She's actually looking _pale._

“I just,” she motions to his room, the other woman there. He shouldn’t feel like he betrayed her, but he does, “this is what you’ve always wanted. Every time. It was selfish of me to...ask for anything different, all those times.”

“What times?”

She just keeps walking backwards, shaking her head. 

“Jyn?”

Suddenly, he can’t let her go. He rises from the table, holding out of hand. She jumps back, frightened.

“What?”

“You’re bleeding.”

_ “What?!” _

He points, because he can’t really say it out loud as blood slithers down her thigh, from under her white dress. Her fingers find it, lifting her hand to examine. 

“Does that...still happen to you?”

Her brow furrows, considering her bloody fingers. He’s staring at the ceiling, flushed in the face, trying to search for a way to be useful in this situation without having to  _ talk about it.  _ He goes to the sink and runs a towel under warm water, really his only crisis management skill left after years as a bartender. She grips the towel when handed to her, but her fear seems deeper than that because she doesn’t move to do anything about the bleeding. 

She clears her throat. “Sorry. This hasn’t happened to me in about 500 years.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know, I know, I'm *going somewhere* with this.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this chapter has some darker stuff. Most notably, medieval Jyn is chest-binding to blend in, and there's the usual consequences of irresponsible chest binding (don't fucking do it with bandages or tape please buy a binder don't be like medieval Jyn)

**2017**

There is a prostitute in his bed and a bleeding angel on his couch, but most absurd is the feeling of awkwardness as he buys tampons for one of them at three in the morning. He tries to ignore the knowing look of the 24 Hour Pharmacy employee, and throws in a box of condoms -even though there’s  _ enough _ at home- just to reclaim some of that masculinity that’s threatened. He’s buying tampons like a bitch, but he’s getting laid like a man. He shouldn’t be so green, so insecure about this, but it’s the first time he’s ever had to.

The box bumps against his leg in its plastic bag sling on the walk home, taut and incriminating. He hasn’t ever done this for someone else. He’d avoided  _ that _ trauma for this long. 

Jyn is where he left her, hunched in a ball, washcloth clenched in her fist. There’s a wet spot on the couch for where she was squeezing it in her hand; he knows for sure he’s an asshole when the first thing he does is extract it from her grip and toss it in his sink. When it hits the basin with a wet thud, he reminds himself he can't be selfless for five seconds, apparently.

Her face is twisted, pale and wide-eyed. He crouches down by the couch. 

“Are you okay?”

Her lip quivers. Those knowing eyes are so huge, ancient and childlike all at once. She’s seen everything, yet none of it has been enough. Mostly she just looks confused by it all. “I haven’t felt pain in a long time.”

He raises his eyebrows. He stumbles into his kitchen and digs through his recycling bin. He’s finally satisfied with the size of one empty plastic bottle he finds, after making a huge mess of his kitchen of the rejects, one  large enough to make a difference. He goes to the sink and fills it with hot water, caps it tightly, and hands it to Jyn.

“Wedge it between your legs, or against your stomach.”

She passes the warmth of it back and forth in her hands, and obeys. Her thighs clench to work it closer to the source of the pain, and after a moment, her brow relaxes. 

“How’d you learn that trick?” she murmurs, glancing up at him. Her wings are wedged tightly against her back, from different angles, it looks like she doesn’t even have them at all. 

He drops himself onto the other side of the couch, with her in a fetal position with her head by his hip. He tries not to tense, or move too self-consciously. 

He wants to touch her wings, but that seems rather forward, so he settles a hand on her shoulder. She's tense too, but seems to relax into the touch, under his hand.

“My mom would sometimes sit with a hot water bottle after work, when I was little. I didn’t know what was wrong with her until years later I saw a girlfriend do the same thing, and I  _ definitely _ knew why that time.”

She narrows her eyes suspiciously. 

He holds up his hands innocently. “She wasn’t one to turn down...um, unless...” he clears his throat. “I don’t have a hot water bottle, so I had to improvise this one. Sorry.”

She just looks so miserable, he has to look away, out the window. 

“Do you sleep?”

“Not usually,” she answers. Her voice is so flat and angry. She staring at the door of his bedroom like she wants to burn it down. He sighs, places a foot up on the couch behind her head. Shuffles her around, so she can stretch out over the length of his now reclining body. Propping her up before laying them both down brings her face close to his, and she looks at him closely, probably more closely than anyone has in a long time. She settles her head on his chest, accepting his offer. They cuddle on his couch with only the faint outside light from street lamps and the dancing shadows of the air conditioner rustling the curtains.

"So I guess you didn't miss everything about being human."

“Your home is a mess,” she murmurs. He grimaces. 

“Hush.”

“Your mother would cry to see this.”

“Talk about something else,” he growls, but it’s without malice. Her wings flex, the feathers ruffling. He stares at them as the move, because he's pinned under them and there's not much else to look at.

“You want to touch them.”

It’s not an offer. It’s an accusation. He plays dumb: “You're going to have to be way more specific...”

“Don’t be an idiot. You just had sex an hour ago. You know what I mean.”

He swallows. “Yes.”

Her wings shudder at the place they join her back. Then they too seem to relax, resting and stretched flat against the couch.

“Go ahead.”

His fingers are light in the feathers- the bones underneath seem thin, like a bird’s. It unnerves him too much. She sighs as his dips his hand instead to the skin between her shoulders, where they merge into her human form. The muscle there is tense and sinewed, and he digs his fingertips in, kneading. Testing. She shudders against him, and with her lying between his legs, he can’t have that without blaspheming a little bit..

Her thumb is tracing circles on the cap of the bottle of warm water that’s easing the tension at her belly. He drops his hand to the top of her head, holding his breath.

 

 

**1497**

The mapmaker was a drunk and his apprentice was a fool, so the map for the next campaign is illegible. Jyn was a relatively better navigator than he, and much better at making sense out of nonsense, so he found himself at her tent. She didn’t respond to his call of her name, so when he entered, he was aware of his mistake the minute he saw her unbinding her breasts from a long length of bandages. He would have, in only this instance, been relieved to notice the tits underneath, but instead his eyes were drawn the the bruises around her ribs, the popped blood vessels where her breasts curled under her sternum.

She looked like she had been through war, and it was through nothing more than hiding her breasts from her fellow soldiers. He hadn't known she was taking the precaution, he just assumed she was as flat as boy.

She was now aware of his presence, and had an arm banded around her chest.

He shut the flap behind him, just to offer her some privacy. He turned his back to face away from her next. 

“I’m sorry.”

He had never really taken the time to think of the disadvantage she had, and guilt was making his face flame. That maybe she was facing troubles he'd ignored. 

She dressed quickly, pulling a tunic on over her naked chest. The damage looked horrible, maybe worse than it felt, but not by much, and she winced as she raised her arms. 

“It was an honest mistake.” her voice is tight. 

“I...I called your name.”

“I was distracted.”

“I didn’t mean to-”

“I didn’t hear.”

Neither blamed each other; but themselves.

There was an awkward silence. He cleared his throat.

“Those bruises…”

She chewed her lower lip, and he finally turned to face her to catch her pained expression.

“It’s from binding them,” she explained. “If it’s too tight…”

“Why do it?”

She stared at the dirt floor. “I have to convince an army of men to follow my voice. Part of it is an image, and part… Princess Leia had warned me not to tempt them, for my own protection.”

The Holy Order of Princess Leia had been the detour of the century: with her wisdom and calm, guiding Jyn into a rare moment of security during their three-days rest at the convent. He had never wanted that scouting mission to end, watching his serious martyr find a moment of peace.

“I want to protect you, if I can.”

She shrugged him off. “I can take care of myself.”

He drew closer, hands catching the hem of her tunic. “I’m not offering because you can’t. I’m offering because you shouldn’t have to, and you have so much to handle, and because I believe in you, Jyn,” his voice softened; “I want to show it. I want to…”

She was very still, but rested her hand on his shoulder. “Alright.”

“I’ll stay closeby?” 

She nodded.

“Until you ask me to go. Feel free to ask me to go.”

She shook her head. 

He sighed heavily, and looked down at the garment in his hands. His eyes found hers. She nodded again.

Her eyes stayed on the ground, because since the night at the tavern, she was ashamed to think that maybe he didn't go to bed with her not because she lacked physically, but just because he had seen her as she was and didn't want _Jyn._

He lifted the tunic over her head, and she covered her breasts in with her arms again. He let out a hiss at the closer look. The bruises caged her ribs, purpling and ugly and awful. He wanted to press his lips to them, like the women weeping and kissing Christ's wounds during the crucifixion. 

His fingers found the reddened parts of her back, not bruised but the circulation was damaged. He pressed his fingers into the cold skin gently, trying to coax blood flow back. Her lips pursed as she let herself fall back against his touch. He was so careful with her. She flinched just because what had to be done was painful. He apologized between presses of his fingers. She just kept nodding him on, her eyes closed.

There was a bowl of water beside her bedroll, so he guided her down to her knees. He washed her back, ghosting the cold cloth over her ribs. Her own breasts she kneaded under her hands, a slight sound of pain escaping.

There was dread forming in her stomach, she was both exposed and disgusting, and he was looking.

But her heart still squeezed. He was showing devotion, maybe not longing, but kindness. He was always kinder than he let himself think.

He wasn’t doing this for himself. She was handling what she could stand to, what she couldn’t stand him doing. Through joint effort, the tension somewhat relaxed

He tossed the bandages aside.

“I’m burning these in the morning fire.”

She protested, but he shook his head. 

“If you tie them that tight again, I will. And no sleeping with them on. You could have broken a rib from that.”

“In my sleep-”

“If anyone enters your tent while you sleep, they will find me with my sword drawn.”

“And mine,” she argued, her chin stubborn and firm. 

He smiled, sighing softly as he dabbed at her spine with cold water. 

“Whatever suits you.”

He could do much about the bruising itself, only the lack of circulation where the bandages were tightest. He ran a cold cloth as lightly as his could, but there wasn’t much else he could do to fix the problem, or the reason there was a problem in the first place.

“Do you feel unsafe here?”

She tilted her head forward. He watched her shoulders roll back, her back twitching with pins and needles as blood flow returned.

She nodded. 

“But you do this anyway.”

“I have to,” her voice cracked. She took a deep breath to steady herself. “I must.”

He was done. His thumb pressed to a pale spot above the bruising, the rib under her breast. She couldn't breathe. There was so much happening around them, much bigger than them, but there was also this. And she wanted _this_ so much. She thought about his words at the tavern constantly. 

Then his hand pulled away. She shivered. He handed her the tunic. She shrugged it on, but testingly, lifted her arms over her head and exposed herself to him in order to wiggle into the garment. If he found her so sexless, so be it. When her face appeared out of the neck, his eyes were averted. 

“Why are you helping me?”

“Because I have done terrible things for this war, and thought I was beyond redemption. But you have given me hope.”

He began clearing her boots away from the foot of her bedroll. His intention was clear. He was sleeping at her feet like a watchdog. 

Jyn didn't like him at her feet, even upon his own submission. She liked him at her side.

 

**1967**

“Another child is missing.”

His hand halted on the blackboard, eraser clutched in his fingers. The words chilled him, especially since she waited to speak until the children had filtered out of the hallways back to the dorms. Their noise was gone, and it felt like he and Jyn were the only ones on the planet.

“Who?”

“Poe. He threw a snowball at recess yesterday and Krennic reported him. I was told one of the nuns came in the dorm in the middle of the night and no one knows where they took him.”

Jyn was always so neatly tucked into her habit, razor thin slice in his vision that seemed to tear whatever was framing her apart so that she was the sole focus. His vision curved around her like she was a centering weight in the fabric of the world.

He cleared his throat, the starch in his collar pricking his neck. He tried not to show her fear. She’d been hiding her wings to help him in this quest. There was a reason she was on earth, and it wasn’t for him.

“Are any of the children afraid?”

“They keep asking me what happened.”

“How’s his friend?”

“Finn? He’s terrified.”

“Can we do anything?”

His guilt was vast. There was only so much he could blame on himself, and when he ran out, he blamed it on last week. He would probably blame it always on what happened last week. 

Standing besides her at vespers, unbeknownst to everyone else her divinity, his pointer and middle finger reached for her hand, curling around her pinky. She blushed under the candlelight, but was otherwise unmoved.

Jyn now folded her hands in front of her. Untouchable. She glanced to the door. “I told him to come here after class.”

He covered his eyes in one hand, rubbing his lids. His head ached every day since she arrived with the task to keep these children safe. He labored under the knowledge he would never forgive himself if he failed. “I thought I was doing the right thing, by becoming a teacher here. I never thought I’d be ignorant to so many terrible things, doing so many terrible things.”

Footsteps were still a little awkward for her, but she crossed the classroom, her cold fingers on his cheeks.

“You mustn’t give up,” she said evenly, but there was fear in her eyes. “You must not be afraid. And you must not lose faith.”

“We have to act.”

“We are, I promise. It takes patience. We could get the students on a bus and run away from here, but there will just be more brought in, and we’d be caught, and we would fail. I do not intend to fail, and but that does not mean I am accepting an evil I can change.”

She dropped her hands from his face when Finn appeared in the door. Her smile was gentle. 

“Are you alright, Finn?”

The student began to cry, his little face crumpling. 

Jyn slid her arms around the boy. The priest watched, his eyes steady on her, and wondered what it must be like to be held in a divine embrace. The child needed it more than he did, but after what their joint efforts had unearthed, her comfort was all he wanted sometimes. 

He left his family at a young age, like all the children here, and needed a maternal presence. What better than an angel to give that? She let him crumple up against her, lying on the floor with his head in her lap. The priest was moderately jealous that there was that kind of support to be offered, for he would have asked it of her during most of this mission she had given him.

“We’ll find Poe,” Jyn promised, and there was no trace of a lie on her face. He believed her; she would move mountains to do it.

“Why are we here?” Finn pressed his brow to her knees. She stroked a hand down his back, looking as divine as the Madonna.

“You’re here to learn English,” Jyn replied automatically. That was what all the faculty were instructed to tell the children why they were in an orphanage.  _ You parents sent you to us to teach you English. _ That was why they couldn’t go home.

“We all spoke English at home already,” Finn said helplessly, and the priest saw it in a flash, a pull of emotion on the angel’s face that was agonized, he dared think it once; human.

She looked up at him standing by his desk and feeling useless, with a fear in her eyes she needed to communicate with him; never once did she feel the need to tell him what she was feeling, and yet now he felt he was falling inside her soul with merely a look. 

 

**2017**

They wake up a few hours later. He is amazed at how good she felt against him, despite there still being another woman currently in his bedroom he  _ had just had sex with, _ he felt surprisingly touch-starved with Jyn around. Her eyes flutter open, and she blinks with the alien expression of someone who did not seem to understand how they had been asleep.

“Are you okay?”

“I don’t know.”

“Any idea why this is happening?”

“No. It shouldn’t be.”

He glances at her, a smile cracking his lips. His tongue traces the bottom corner of his mouth as he considers her.

“And God made Eve to bear the curse, the curse of blood…”

She throws a pillow at him, moaning softly. Her hand covers her face. It’s so remarkably human, her wings trembling in embarrassment are the only tie to what she really is.

“Maybe this has something to do with our little quest. Are you my Gabriel?”

She shakes her head. “It’s not that.”

“Are you sure, because it’s odd how suddenly your body decides to be fertile in my presence?”

Jyn lifts herself off of him, and he feels cold with her gone.

_ “If it was _ **_that,_ ** _ I would know, _ and I would pick someone other than you for it.”

“It would explain your grudge for the Virgin Mary, stealing your thunder…”

Jyn’s eyes are icy, but she just shakes her head. “I don’t have anything against her, except a need for credit. I’m assuming I still need to learn something about pride, to let it go. That’s my lesson, maybe.”

Cassian raises his eyebrows. “Did God tell you that? Because I could have told you that.”

“I see it in myself,” she looks at the floor, faraway, in her heavenly self. “God hasn’t told me anything.”

“ _ What?” _

Jyn raises her eyebrows, snapped back to his side. “You don’t think I can see God, can you?”

_ “Isn’t that the whole point.” _

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she dismissed, hugging her knees. “How could we get you to do anything if we could confirm that for sure. It would just fill confessionals in rotation. Nothing would mean anything if you knew.”

“You say if  _ we _ don’t know. Do  _ you _ know?”

Jyn flinches, pulls away from him. She stands. The blood is gone, her body seems to resume some of that angelic glow. It seems to be out of her system, whatever was happening. Like she had the divine version of food poisoning. 

“Jyn, do you even know God is real?”

She glances over her shoulder at him.

“I always think,  _ of course he’s real, why else would I be here? _ But I can’t give you proof. Not in this life.”

“But you’re dead.”

She shrugs. Turns her head to face the window. “I don’t know what I am.”

“Jyn, they killed you. They burned you alive. You died.  _ You had to have seen something.” _

“They did,” she tilts her head to look at the floor. “But here I am. Maybe I have unfinished business. My faith has carried me here. Where has your doubt taken you?”

There’s a muffled moan from his room.  _ Exactly here, _ he thinks to himself, _ this is where your chosen one has been led. _ With a prostitute in his bed, not the first and probably not the last, and an angel riding his ass to be better and he fails her every time. 

He covers his face with his hands. When he looks up, she’s gone.


	5. Chapter 5

**1497**

The war had lost its first push, and the faith that guided many had begun to fall into question. He saw it in the war room, muttered amongst officials. They wondered aloud if Jyn was still a powerful enough tool. Not to her face, of course. That seemed a bit too blasphemous, despite their disturbing lack of faith.

He kept her from knowing, kept her strong, kept at her side. 

She let him lie at her feet every night, and on the coldest night of the year, declared that God-chosen or not, she would not have him shivering like that. He slept in her bedroll with his back to her. 

He woke with her face nuzzled between his shoulders. 

“Warm,” she murmured, reaching to touch his back. He was clothed, but it didn’t do much to make him separate from her. “I think about how you said that once…”

Her fingers traced the angle of his shoulder blade. 

The morning was awkward, but it was the peaceful sleep he’d had in years.

He rolled onto his side. 

“We shouldn’t…”

She nodded. “Saints don’t…”

“They don’t.”

He tucked himself closer to her. The light from outside was so faint, they didn’t have to exit the tent and be themselves for a little while at least. 

“Sometimes, they are kissed, though.”

She licked her lips and nodded. “Sometimes. Mostly on the hands.”

“Hands.”

He pulled her hands free from under the blankets. They were cold, and he pressed his lips to her palms, humming at the feeling of her bare skin. 

They lay in the relative darkness as he kissed, her swallowing thickly at his warmth, and then the way he slid his mouth to her wrists and sucked at her pulse just once. 

“With reverence,” he murmured against her skin, “if I kiss you with reverence?”

“It should be permitted; or at least forgiven.”

He wove his hands in her messy hair, pressing his eager lips to her. His kiss did not beg the salvation he so needed from her, but instead thanked her for it. Her eyes fluttered shut, lying on the freezing ground, and clung to the fabric between them at his stomach, keeping herself very saintly and still to be acted upon by a disciple. 

They stayed like that, her face smooth under his kisses, until they reached the edge of reverence. He pulled away to a respectful distance and reached out of bed for his out layers. He dropped her cape into bed with her, which was laced with a morning chill, but when she snuggled against it, it warmed with her body heat so she wouldn’t have to get up and put it on cold. 

He couldn’t protect her from the growing doubt, though.

Nights later, voices rose over the dinner fire. 

“Why should we listen to her,” muttered a soldier with a swollen lip, blood squeezing between his teeth. “Dragging us through the mud for months over a vision. What proof does she have? What if she’s crazy?”

He lifted the soldier by the collar, shaking him. 

“I don’t care what she saw. She’s proven enough. I would follow her until the end of my days.”

Jyn lifted her eyes from her plate, her face stunned into a perfect bloodless moon. He lowered his eyes.

They didn’t know how to speak of it again.

 

**1851**

“You really don’t mind doing this.”

She unbound the switch woven into her hair, making it long and shiny and fashionable. The false locks fell down her shoulders, free of their messy knot. She looked a bit like a painting of Ophelia a friend of his had recently completed. 

“This isn’t...how I looked then…” she said with a gritted jaw,  _ “But no.” _

He reached for her to adjust the hair so it pre-covered her over the robe. Once the robe was off, it wasn’t going to make much of a difference. 

“I can get a different model for the...if you wanted.”

She shook her head. “She’ll probably have large breasts and be entirely too liberal in your presence,” she smiled at him like she knew him, and it wasn’t the eye of an artist that made it so hard to look away from her. 

He cleared his throat. 

“You are my muse, after all. My divine one,” he corrected himself, and she smiled wider.

“I’m not making you save lives just yet,” she said, her hands shaky on the ties of the robe, “just paint me.”

Her modesty was to be expected, though he never remembered asking her to do this, and in fact offered her a thousand ways to not have to undress for him.

He went to his easel, and she stretched out on a velvet sofa. The skylight was giving the perfect amount of light to her face, her profile would be at its most distinct in this lighting.

“Of course. I don’t want anyone to forget you. You were so young.”

She shed her robe, maybe a signal she didn’t want to talk about it.

“Those things are lost now,” she lay on her stomach and let her wings extend so he could get them in the light he had wanted. Dumbly, he started mixing blues for the shadows of the feathers. 

“Chin up,” he murmured, but he was already moving at a furious pace.

She was so composed and serene, but for the first time he saw her sadness when she stretched out completely naked in front of him. She tucked some of the false hair behind her ear, an almost child-like reflex, and he held up his hand for her to pause. Her fingertips rested against her skull, her expression curious, but he started working the sketch as she was. She relaxed into the pose, propping her head up with a soft expression. 

“I don’t want anyone to forget you, too.”

 

**1967**

She’d appeared like a dream. He loved her a little too much. 

But the school was so awful, the children scared and miserable, himself half insane trying to keep track of the disappearances that were getting out of hand. And Jyn appeared like a dream. Her warm hands touched his face. She stroked his hair out of his eyes, snuffed out his cigarettes with a divine wind. Looked him in the eyes, like so few people did anymore.

Her wings and the golden light and the breeze around them, alone in his room one night. That’s what he remembered. Almost offered her the space on the other side of his bed. 

“I have a quest for you, Cassian Andor…” 

 

**2017**

“If I were up on that pole, maybe you would listen to me.”

He doesn’t even turn around, but he does smile. “If you were up on that pole, I would  _ definitely _ not listen to you.”

Her breath ghosts over his neck, and he knows if he turns he won’t find her there. 

“What brings you here?” He takes a casual sip of his drink. She would not be deterred, strip-club or not.

Her hand falls to his shoulder.

“You brought me here.”

“What?”

“You... I heard you.”

He scrubs his mind, and yes, there is something that spears guilt into him:

A dancer’s open legs, suspended in the air in a slow downward spiral. 

And ‘ _ Jyn, please’ _ forming a complete question in his mind. 

Her chin presses down on his shoulder, her eyes following his. But he’s blind to what’s happening onstage; she has to know that. 

“That’s not what I’m here for, Cassian.”

He nods, settling his eyes back on the dancer. 

“I know.”

“I’m not your-”

“Then what are you here for,” he snaps at her. Her chin raises. Her mouth is by his ear. 

“Why don’t you do some research. You can’t believe things just because I tell you to.”

“You’re the Saint of Quests.”

“You don’t know what I am.”

“The devil?”

She laughs. His hair ruffles with the breath. His hand flinches up to comb it off his neck, and his fingers brush her lips. They’re warm. He pulls his hand away, useless on the table in front of him. 

“Why do you always come to see me, when I’m in this...kind of state?”

She shrugs.

“You always seem to need me when you’re like this. I think you’re lonely.”

“So let me,” he gestures to the stage.  _ Let me make mistakes.  _

“You want answers.”

Finally, he nods. He does. She’s finally broken him. He wants to know why. He wanted to know since he saw her bleed. It wasn’t the wings that got him. It was her warmth, the things that made her human once. 

“There’s a book waiting with the Priest who took your confession.” 

_ “The Bible?” _

She pinches his side, and he arches his back to lean on her. Her laugh disappears by his ear. The warmth of her breath makes his spine tingle.

“You’re better at taking jokes now.”

She returns her chin to his shoulder, gazing up into the neon lights with him. He’d rather be looking at her. 

“I think God has a sense of humor if you need him to. If it works. It’s different for everyone, Cassian.”

“I don’t know what God uses to speak to me.”

“Then why don’t you try.”

“Tell me yours,” he blurts out, curious, “if you haven’t even proven he exists yet. Which is terrifying, by the way, why should I even believe you-”

She lets out a pensive sigh. “There are moments. I think it’s a narrative thing. When you see the problem from beginning to end. Setups and payoffs. There are moments of irony where...I almost have to look at the sky and say ‘touche’. There’s a sense of humor to it.”

“God has a very fucked up sense of humor,” he sighs, reaching for his drink. 

“I never said God didn’t.”

Jyn’s voice is flat, defeated. There’s a weight of pain in the words, but he’s sure he can’t even comprehend what she’s hurting over. 

Her hand falls to his thigh, it’s a heavy press, one that’s not disinterested. But he can’t see her hand, can’t see her, and when he turns around, she’s gone without a trace.

 

**1497**

“They’re not letting you bring an army?”

She shook her head, her sword held up before her as she wiped it clean from blood. He’d never seen her do that, he assumed a god-anointed blade didn’t need to be cleaned. 

“I asked for an army. The council has declined.”

“I told you they were going to turn on you.”

“It is a peaceful conference with the Empire”

“I don’t trust it.”

Her face told him she clearly didn’t either. 

“Faith will carry us forward,” she said blandly, only because the priests had been swarming, and her saintly presence was suggested to be seen rather than heard, and if heard, from a strict script. 

“I don’t want you to go.”

He took the sword from her hand. She glared up at him. 

Would he get in the way of  _ this. _ It was so much bigger than him, and her too. She was chosen by God to do this. 

“I have to,” she said quietly, as if either of them had a choice. 

He sank to his knees. His hand folded around hers. 

“I know.”

“Are you still with me?”

He pressed his lips to the back of her hand, squeezing his fingers around it. “All the way.”

 

2017

Father Rook has the text Jyn was referring to. He gives it to him without question. 

Cassian brings it home.

Like he brought home a date well out his league, he stalls getting it open. He paces, makes tea he won’t drink, avoids looking at it. 

He takes the coward’s route and googles her first. 

There’s one pre-raphaelite painting of her, from 1851, that strikes him. It’s the most like Jyn, her face sculpted the exact same way, like she had modeled for the real thing. Her hair’s too long, though. The artist never sold the painting, didn’t allow it to be parted from him. But he died not long after it was completed. 

For some reason, maybe guided by _...no,  _ his eyes fall on the name of the painter.  **Cassian Andor, 1851.**

The citation places the painting, made in London in the Victorian Era, in a museum in this very city. 

He blames Jyn’s interference, maybe her and God’s fucked up sense of humor, and surrenders. He goes to the book. 

There’s nothing too jarring in this legend. A girl named Jyn was given a holy quest, but she saw God through a vision of her father. That surprised him, but it explained the face she couldn’t put to God. Maybe people just all saw it differently. 

What was new knowledge was her most devoted follower, a soldier who became her protector. 

There was little mention of his life. 

Cassian’s stomach twists when he reaches the end. The war council turned on her. They used her to guide them to victory and abandoned her as terms of a treaty. She was handed over to the Empire and burned alive. A painful death for such a small thing. 

Cassian isn’t sure why, but every bad thing he reads about happening to her makes him think of her eyes, how sad they always look. 

But she never seemed sorry for herself. She seems sorry for...him. 

And not other humans. Strippers she accepts with a respectful dignity that surprises him. She’s gentle with others, non-judgemental. But she keeps looking at him, with a look of unhappiness he never sees in the gilded text, her hair shining and her smile brave and uplifted. History took something from Jyn. 

There’s a knight kneeling at her feet. Familiar somehow. A man in white reading out her sentencing, her eyes are to God. But they’re closed. Accepting. The same knight is in the crowd with a face contorted with rage. 

Jyn’s burning now, in the illustration. Her eyes are closed. Accepting. But her face is small and afraid, because there wasn’t time. She was 23 years old when she died. 

The knight again. A man, who looks unnervingly like him. A man who is throwing himself directly into the fire. 

Cassian; her disciple. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Um, guys...thank you so much for reading a fanfiction about religion.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mild trigger warning; this chapter includes a scene of non-sexual corporal punishment, so someone does get spanked and it Is. Not. Supposed. To. Be. Sexy.

**2017**

There are healthy ways to deal with the loss of something you never even had; instead, Cassian drank. For the rest of the night, slapping the side of his head if so much as her name appeared in his mind. 

He wakes up late, the afternoon sun warming his apartment, with a headache sharp and agonizing. But no Jyn. He isn’t relieved by this one way or another. 

Cassian goes into the bar hours early. Chirrut has the doors open to let in some afternoon air before smoke filled the whole place and make it hard to breathe. Every day before opening, he aired out the room and listened to the radio. 

Cassian slides behind the bar and fills a glass for himself, palm flat the lacquered wood. Something strong and clear and biting. He downs it. 

“Starting early?”

He rolls up his sleeves, picking up a rag to wipe down the bar.

“I figured I’d pick up some extra hours.”

“I didn’t mean your shift,” Chirrut smiles calmly, his seat at one of the tables a restful place where he can at least face some of the sunshine. “Something’s troubling you.”

“Nothing.”

“You’ve always carried something with you, Cassian, but I have a sense it’s cracking open right now.”

Chirrut sighs to himself, pleased to sense Cassian tensing. It doesn’t matter if he’s blind, he catches everything. Cassian just trusted he could always blame the blindness.

This job was really the only tie to reality once his military career ended. And after his mother's death. 

Grief worked in mysterious ways, and despite not feeling like his mother was different than any other mother, Cassian could not escape the reach of his own, even with the last of her belongings shoved in a box in his closet. He can practically hear her smugness that a true Catholic Guardian Angel has been following him, though she probably wouldn't have approved of the contents of their many conversations about strippers. 

“Who’s your friend?” Chirrut adds, the sun hitting his face. 

He looks up, Jyn’s on a barstool. 

Her eyes are deeply shadowed, but the wings are still there. Taunting him. 

“How can you see her?” he snaps at Chirrut, choosing to ignore her. He sees her flinch, and feels he’s gotten all he needs from that choice.

"It is a mystery," his boss teases, and it's clear that's all the answer he will get. 

“What do you want?” he asks her.

She licks her lips. “I know what it looks like-”

“I’m not throwing myself into a fire for you.”

She flinches again, and lowers her eyes to her hands. Chirrut is silent, but it’s clear he’s listening. 

“I would never ask that of you.”

“I don’t know what makes you decide I have to do this, but I never volunteered myself to die for you. I’d like you to find someone else.”

She doesn’t lift her eyes. “It’s not about wanting. For me either. We just need to reach the end of this.”

“I was something to you, in another life. But what makes you think I’m anything now?”

“Because I’d find you. Every time. I recognize you. We died too young, and this is the chance-”

“Are you in love with me?” his face twists, and he backs up with his hands held up. Like she’s mugging him or something. It’s a shitty thing to ask, and he doesn’t even suspect it; but she has a point and she’s cornering him and it’s a good way to take a step back and keep her confused. Instead, she just looks disappointed. "You don't know me. I'm not that guy."

“That’s not what this is about. It was never like that.”

“Then what? I have to leap into a witch-burning fire for you and you start this all over?”

“Do you think I want to watch him die again?” She slaps her hands down on the bar, her wings flapping angrily and lifting her feet off the ground. Her jaw clenches as she hovers in his face, searching it for someone. For someone he was, maybe someone he isn’t yet. But the person before her is not what she’s looking for; just a clue. 

He sees her faith die in her eyes before she vanishes.

 

**1851**

He made her laugh. He smeared paints around on his palette when he did it, pretending to mix colors, not looking at her, but the laugh fell from her lips, and she shifted against the velvet couch, playing with the ends of the false hair sewn into her real hair. She mentioned the style was too close to the recent portrait of Ophelia, and he promised her she’ll be twice as beautiful and not catch influenza. 

Her wings trembled every time he said something like that.

He flirted, and he shouldn’t have, but she also should have been better. This should have been easier, every time, but it wasn’t. 

She always took this chance. In the next life. And the next.

 

**1967**

At the end of another painstaking English class, where Jyn had to pretend none of these children were perfectly fluent already, she held Finn and Poe after the bell and knelt at their level. 

“I was looking at some of the records this week, and it looks like it’s someone’s birthday soon.”

She smiled at Poe, who always adored her, but even he had been at the school too long to expect anything special. He was shaking as though his hope would kill him. A tear stung the corner of her eye. 

“Can you keep a secret? Father Cassian and I wanted to give you a present. And you and Finn could help us figure out what.”

She opened her desk drawer and handed them each a small bag of candy. “Here. You don’t have to share.”

Finn straightened, his dark eyes glimmering but distrustful. 

“What do you want for your birthday, Poe?”

Poe chewed his lower lip. He wouldn't look up at her.

“Is something wrong?”

“We don’t like when teachers ask us to stay after class.” Finn said bluntly. 

Jyn stood up defensively. She knew what it looked like, and the fact that they were aware of these kinds of tricks made her stomach churn. Human emotions still dogged her down, they exhausted her, but Cassian was so weary from all she had told him, she had to stay strong for him. 

“Would you rather talk outside in the hallway?”

Both boys looked surprised, and nodded. She ushered them outside. They stuffed the bags of candy in their pockets. She lowered herself onto a bench to be eye level. 

“We can’t do much, but is there something you want for your birthday?”

Poe nodded. 

“To sit between you and Father Cassian at Mass.”

Her next breath caught in her throat. Finn was looking at her like she had better never say _no_ to his friend. 

“Of course,” Jyn whispered. It was such a realistic request for a child that it killed her. 

Mass was always an ordeal under Krennic. Everyone was anxious, even the teachers. 

Friday Mass was another story. Friday was when demerits for the week had been tallied, and penance was due for confession on Sunday. Students who acted out were announced before the entire school, without warning, and dealt with how Krennic saw fit. 

“You may sit between us,” Jyn promised, “can Finn sit beside you?”

Poe nodded.

“When’s your birthday, Finn?”

Finn shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Jyn bit her lip. It wasn’t on record. If he didn’t know, there was no evidence of it.

Poe placed a hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay. I can share my gift with him. I gave him my dad’s jacket too.”

Jyn would tear the lid off of heaven if anything happened to these two boys.

 

**1497**

_ “All the way.” _

Jyn swallowed. Cassian did not rise from his knees. He did not let go of her hand. 

But his eyes raised to her face. She lifted her hand to his cheek. He leaned into the touch. 

“If we should die-”

He shook his head, his eyes squeezed closed. “Then we shall die.”

She let her head fall back when his arms banded around her hips. The tent was freezing. It was so cold, she almost saw ice crystals in his stubble. They had to ride out at dawn, early. Still, her hands began the unwind the ties of her armor. 

“No, I want one thing if we should die.”

His breath left him. He stared up at her, palms upturned, but she shook her head and shoved him back. Like a real girl would. Not a saint. 

“Stop making me into something I'm not. I couldn’t have done this without you at my side.”

“And I would not have been a better man. You have my sword, you have my shield.”

She nodded, half-listening, shoving down her leggings as he said whatever popped into his head, sort of like praying. 

Cassian had women in warm beds on a full stomach in a clean inn. That was how it happened. 

Jyn was bony and shivering and dirty, but she wanted him more than anyone else had. Prayers left his lips once they touched the skin of her thigh, but reverence was still there, and it made her knees weak. He helped her down onto the bedroll and slipped between her thighs, his mouth making promises he would never find the words for. She arched up beneath him, so perfect and trusting and yielding. Her battle-hardened body gave way to pleasure so sweetly. 

She didn’t know what pleased her more; his lips or his devotion. 

 

**1967**

Cassian looked reluctantly excited at her proposal for Poe’s gift. Usually the priests and sisters took the end of an aisle in order to monitor behavior, but Jyn faked a reason to be late for Mass, and tried to slide past Cassian to the far end in a feigned disruptive way, so once she knocked past Poe and Finn he grabbed her arm and yanked her to sit. And like a little family, they had the boys between them.

She could feel instead of truly know that Cassian gave Poe’s hand a gentle squeeze during prayers, as she had done for Finn. And that Poe was made happy by this gift. 

Her heart ached at what she couldn’t have for the first time since she died. Finn rested his sleepy head against her elbow, she nudged him to sit up before they both got into trouble, but it still was the most important she ever felt. 

Still, the bookend of both Jyn and Cassian wasn’t enough to revive spirits at the end of Mass, when Krennic stood at the pulpit. 

“It always pains me to reach this point of the week. I pray on this requirement of my duties every day, and through God, I have found I have to hurt myself a little to help all of you.”

Jyn’s rare human breath hissed out of her nose. Finn was the one to pat her hand, gently, in comfort. 

“And the greatest sin is lying to those who are trying to help you. So while I’m sure all of you have been assigned your proper rosaries, I’m aware of a pupil that requires more prayer from all of us.”

Cassian was shaking. Jyn didn’t know how to comfort him. 

There was no one he wanted it to be. Any name called would have killed him. But Jyn would have died a thousand earthly deaths to never hear the sound that escaped him when Poe was called up. 

She stood before Poe did. 

“Permission, Father, to take his punishment.”

Krennic tilted his head, mostly bored. “And why is that?”

“To teach him that our lies can further hurt the lives of others before they hurt ourselves.”

Finn was clutching her skirt. But everyone else’s eyes were on the floor.

“Do you doubt my authority to properly discipline these children, Sister Jyn?”

Jyn shook her head, her jaw clenched. “Only that your authority doesn’t seem like enough for this boy. I’d like to show him what we can do against the actions against us.”

“Don’t,” Cassian whispered, but Krennic heard all. He smirked. 

“Then why don’t we see how your methods improve the boy, Sister Jyn, with a warning that things will be twice as severe should he not learn from this.”

“I never lied,” Poe hissed. 

“I know,” she whispered, barely loud enough for him to hear. 

Jyn made her exit of the row. Cassian clutched her hand as she dropped to a kneel upon her exit. 

“And Father Cassian, since you doubted the effectiveness of Jyn’s methods, why don’t you let her convince you.”

Jyn’s eyes raised to Cassian, who looked ready to die on the spot. Krennic was already lifting the paddle from behind the pulpit where he kept it near the eucharist. Whenever his hands floated around that spot, the children flinched.  _ Salvation is always found in the same place _ Krennic told them when he lifted one or the other. “Administer the punishment.”

She heard a whimper in the base of his throat. Krennic was vile, and if she had still been a warrior, she would have killed him.

“You must,” Jyn murmured before filing up the aisle with her eyes down. She knelt where she’d seen the other children do the same. Once, a kitchen maid was brought up there as well. But never another adult. She knelt on the first step of the alter, hands folded in front of her. 

Cassian touched her shoulder. Over the clothes was better, but it still  _ hurt. _ She didn’t even have the ability to appear in his mind, to convince him to make it look real. Otherwise, this whole quest would be lost. 

There was a hiss in the air and a slap on her backside, but even she was disappointed how weak it was. She hadn’t felt pain in a few hundred years, but she remembered it differently. 

“Don’t let her pretty face distract you. How else can we learn from this?”

Jyn glanced over her shoulder, Finn and Poe were clutching each other. Her guilt weighed heavy as the realization came; this wasn’t about them. Krennic would have hurt Poe to send a message to Cassian, or her, by extension. Instead, she played right into his hand to force Cassian to hurt her. 

Jyn gave a shaky, indiscernible nod to Cassian, “You can’t hurt me.”

He could, but she couldn’t tell him that. Even if she had her wings, even if she wasn’t appearing in the flesh, she had vowed she would take this punishment for Poe. It wouldn’t mean anything if it wasn’t a sacrifice. She would have felt everything even if she was in divine form, it was how it worked. 

The next swing knocked her onto her elbows on the higher step. She bit back a cry of pain. She heard Cassian whimper above her. 

She’d acted rashly, but she wasn’t going to endure Poe being beaten in front of her ever again. She heard a few of the younger children crying. As a human, she was beloved, which she’d never known before. Her students genuinely liked her, and they were now watching another beloved teacher beat her under Krennic’s instruction. She had no power. Cassian had no power. Only Krennic did. 

She pushed herself back up. Another swing and hideous slap. Her hand caught Cassian’s knee, him standing at her side, and squeezed her hand around his leg to let the pain vent out of her. 

“Leave her to reflect on her choices.”

The other teachers nearly leapt out of their seats to get the children out of there, even the sinister ones, because none of them had ever witnessed a man being forced to beat a nun in front of them before. 

Cassian tried to help Jyn, up, and there was a bruise forming that made that help very much needed. Krennic instead grabbed him by the shoulder and dragged him away. Pain was so new, it was agony, and her knees kept buckling when she tried to stand. 

She knew Cassian, down to the marrow of him and a dozen other lives. He would have killed Krennic on the spot, on sacred ground, if she did not still his fury.

“Go,” she pressed him on with her hands.

The message was sickeningly clear. As she heard Cassian’s pained breathing, she summoned her divine wrath in her throat. This was the very soul that bore fire for her. He died at her feet without so much as a question. 

But somehow, this was the biggest sacrifice he had ever made for her. The worst thing she had ever asked him to do. Holding his tongue when things were too awful. Waiting to act. This wasn’t who she was. He was remembering the parts of her this life had never seen, and she was killing that love with her divine patience. 

This soul had born fire, but it also bore all the love of her immortal being. 

Quest or not; Krennic would die. 

 

**2017**

He tries summoning her back, but she won’t answer. The candles is burned down to nothing, even his mother’s trusted grocer all the way across town can’t yield a replacement.

_ So much for forgiveness... _

Cassian is a man who believed there was nothing; and having that belief affirmed is the hardest thing he’s ever come to terms with.

The night slips away from him with more drink

A customer with black curly hair, wired with gray, settles at a stool of the bar. Cassian saw a lot of people from working there, but not like this. Not like he could barely recognize them for being on a barstool, like he knew them from a time before they would be of age. 

“I’ve seen you before,” Cassian says as he lays his order down for him. His eyes flutter. “I don’t know where.”

Poe just stares back. 

“This is impossible.”

Jyn finds herself in an art gallery. No one else can see her. She still sags onto a bench and overlooks the same painting from one hundred and fifty years ago. He was flirtier, in that life. The one at the school liked to read and smoked too much. The soldier boy was the most devout. There were more. There were always more. Walking along the same life until it dotted out of existence. 

This one will always be the strangest and most mysterious. 

She looks at her own painted face and tries to see herself the way he did then. 

He flirted too much. She let him touch her skin. His hand blistered. It made it harder to hold a brush. The background was a dense shadow because of it, and she preferred it that way. Art critics adored the emphasis on the divine instead of the earthly, her figure cut out of dense shadow. 

The blistered hand that had touched her became infected after the painting was done. 

“Why are you crying?”

Tears have been slipping down her cheeks.

“I’m not crying,” she says first, still accepting the handkerchief offered to her, and then gasps, because she isn’t meant to be seen.

There’s an older man on the bench next to her. He is wearing a jacket loaned to him by a friend nearly a lifetime ago. 

“Finn,” she whispers.

He nods. “I thought I had died for a minute, seeing you again, Jyn.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poor Cassian. Maybe someday I'll write him as capable of spanking Jyn in a better context, but this is def his worst nightmare.


	7. Chapter 7

 

**1967**

“You didn’t hurt me-”

“I did.”

He wasn’t looking at her, a knot twisting his throat. Jyn limped towards him, but it was evidence enough to make him give off a sound she’d never heard from a human before. She stood still, wincing. The bruises would go away, in her immortal form in the span of a blink, but in her impermanent human one...that was unseen.

His face was wrecked. 

“I hurt you.”

“Krennic would have taken it out on someone else, and it was as much to hurt you as it was to hurt me-”

“I didn’t want to.”

“You  _ had _ to-”

“Every terrible thing I have done, I told myself it was because I had to.” He paced around his small room. She listened passed the sounds he made as hard as she could-if she was found there, they’d both be cast out immediately and then this would really be for nothing.

She wrapped herself around him tightly, to get him to stop moving, to prevent him from crying out. He want limp in an instant, accepting her arms. 

“I know this place is hard for you to be a part of-”

Cassian shook his head. 

“I’ve been here since I was a child.”

Her stomach turned. She knew then, he wasn’t just guilty about complacency. He had demons worse than hers, because he was the victim of it.

It hit her so strangely, the uneasy feeling, that even though he looked and felt so much like the person who had joined her on the battlefield…

This was a very different life.

_ “You’ve made it this far. _ So we keep going,” she took his face in her hands. “Why do we keep going?”

He went still. “Because what we’re fighting for is worth it.”

The words were rote, automatic. Something he must have told himself a thousand times. 

Jyn knew he was a priest. That he had taken specific vows. That he had chosen this, and she was posing as this to meet the quest. Cassian was human. She had less to lose. He had his entire life. 

She still rose on her toes and pressed her lips to his. 

 

**2017**

“You don’t seem surprised to see me,” Cassian tried to remain calm. He may not know what is going on, but Jyn has already had him by the balls because of that. He isn’t backing off his sense of control yet.

Poe shrugs. “You always had an aura to you. You and that nun had your own thing going.”

Cassian resents any association with nuns. 

“What nun?”

“At the school. The one I was taken to as a kid. To...teach us English.” Poe looks down at his hands -and indication he was lying- but Cassian isn’t sure why he remembers that. “You and Sister Jyn were teachers there. She would take us all out on walks, you wouldn’t write a kid up even if we threw a brick at you, so none of the nuns would hit us. Jyn was the nice one. She never hit anyone. You two were  _ everything _ to a kid then.”

“I’m not really that person anymore.”

Poe shakes his head, quiet faith radiating from him. “I remember there was this afternoon, it may have been after Easter mass. There was a bench outside the school grounds, everything was blooming, and you two had sat down there to just...talk. She made you laugh.  _ No one _ ever made you laugh before she showed up. And every kid wanted to make an appearance at your feet, like they were checking in with their own parents  because we were stuck at that school.” 

_ School _ is wrapped in the most loathsome of air quotes before he takes a sip of his drink. 

“That  _ priest  _ saw you two laughing. The one who would knock the shit out of us. You two didn’t notice, and it’s not like you were having sex on the bench or anything, but anyone watching knew there was something emotionally tying you two together, and it wasn’t just God.”

_ We gave this to you to experience divinity.  _ Is that what Jyn had told him?

“The twisted bastard was pissed. You two didn’t see it. Because there’s nothing you could say was happening, but  _ everything _ was. I stood there with Finn… we just knew you were doomed.”

Chirrut brushes behind Cassian at the bar. “You two have a lot to talk about.”

He smiles at Poe over Cassian’s shoulder. “He doesn’t take a liking to a lot of people. The war changed him.”

“We’re old friends. He was always a private man,” Poe says with a knowing look. Cassian’s skin is crawling. Chirrut nods. 

“Maybe he was always meant to be, even from back when you knew him. Sometimes, we don’t seen things in the order that they happen, but in the order we’re supposed to connect them.”

Chirrut breezes away after that.

“So what happened to us?” Cassian tries to bite back the bile rising in his throat. He could have been better. He could have better. 

Poe shrugs. “They took me before I ever found out.”

 

**1851**

“It’s done.”

“You’re sure?”

Jyn’s chin was rested on her folded hands. The velvet of the couch was rubbing her bare skin, Cassian made her lay there for so long she was able to feel it with more definition hour by hour. 

He seemed slightly offended. “When you know you know.”

She sighed coolly, and he laughed, cleaning his hands with a rag. “You fell asleep.”

“I did?”

“You sound surprised.” 

“I don’t usually have to.”

“Maybe you’re just tired.”

She shrugged, sliding her cheek to the pillow of her hands now, examining him. She should probably get dressed. But she didn’t. She was anxious to keep her wings obscuring her body when he wasn’t directly working, but at this point, they stayed outstretched. 

“That’s not how it works.”

“Then maybe you’ve given up your divinity for me.”

She snorted, “That must be it.”

He was staring at his brushes, maybe out of respect for her modesty. Jyn sighed. She’d been surprised this one was an artist, but he was just as devoted a painter as he was a soldier. 

“May I see it?”

“My Commission from the heavens?”

She remembered when she had first appeared to him;  _ usually God demands a work in his name to be, you know, in a church  _ but he’d had a few glasses of wine that night and that did make her laugh. 

“Someone needs to find it in the future,” she explained. 

“Who?”

Her eyes fluttered shut

“They’re not born yet.”

“When do I meet them?”

Jyn shook her head. “You won’t.”

Cassian was quiet at that, though usually a conversational man. It was odd, that things did change between the ones she met. None of them were the person who died for her, and she had tried not to be disappointed that she could only find traces in their eyes of the one she lost. This one, having not been in any wars, was a little less pained, but did enjoy being  _ tortured _ for the sake of his art. 

It was odd, telling him that the importance of his quest would not be seen, for he was a man that would die someday. Before it was all over. 

He spun the easel towards her.

She looked like herself, despite the switch woven in her hair. Instead of having it run down her body, as was fashionable with a few of his colleagues, it was swept neatly over one shoulder, not distracting. 

It was odd to see her face there, created under his hands. 

Managing, with some difficulty, to fold her wings neatly, she rolled over onto her back. He looked pointedly at the floor, his eyebrows raised as if asking the question. 

She nodded. 

He walked over and knelt in front of the couch. Her thumb was idly stroking the velvet. 

“You used to kiss me with reverence,” Jyn didn’t look up at him. He swallowed. "In another life."

“If you asked me, I’d do anything-”

“I don’t want to you.”

Jyn wanted him, even if he wasn’t the same. She lifted her eyes to him. 

He leaned back, but she grabbed him by the collar. “Not  _ reverently.” _

He moaned when she placed her lips on his. His hands trembled, and dropped to her soft skin, curving around her hip. Her tongue passed his lips and he felt nothing but flesh, and ache for her rising like a burn as he kneaded against her hip bone-

And then a burst of fire took her out of the room, burning him from fingertip to shoulder. 

 

**1497**

She kept her eyes on him during the trail. He never lifted them from her face. 

She saw what she saw, and no one believed her. He wished there was something he could do or say, but her followers surrounded him, he kept them close, but there was nothing he could do with them or their devotion when she was sentenced to die.

She smiled serenely at him as the court descended into chaos. A saint, a symbol, would be burned. She smiled and mouthed to Cassian; "I am not afraid."

It was a rush, her head shaved, her hands chained, and her body hauled forward into the flames. It was so quick, and the agony was so great she sincerely doubted God was protecting her from anything. 

The last thing her mortal eyes ever saw was Cassian hurling himself into the flames after her. 

 

**0**

Jyn stopped remembering time as a sequence of moments. That’s how she lost track of time in between. She was walking through black space until suddenly she wasn’t, she was living a life in a convent, then she was lounging, being painted, she could use her wings to fly in the air but not to get herself to whatever was next. It wasn’t until the light around her blacked out and she would step through the darkness for whatever she was meant to do next. Cassian asked her to leave his apartment, then she was holding a dying boy’s hand. She didn’t remember the apartment when she was with the soldier, so it must have happened before, just in the connective tissue where the image would appear, she would take a step, and intersect into the gallery. It was happening in order, all at once, with her immortal self walking between the moments until one caught her by the ankle.

That was how time worked now.

She never used to think as she walked. But she started to string it all together, and she had to keep going because whatever happened next in 1851 could be the answer to the question in 1967.

She didn’t like this place, because it never gave her answers. Whenever she met a human, she wanted to laugh when they hinted they assumed she was lounging on a cloud until a  gold-wrapped scroll was presented to her by her favorite Saint and then she’d float down with a plan in real time. But she never remembered it until she was sucked out of the moment and back in it, realizing she had just set the person she loved on fire. 

That was how she learned that she couldn’t be with a human that way. Not through a sacred text. By making him lust for her and then scorch himself on her skin. The kind of thing you don’t learn until it’s too late.

 

**2017**

“You remember me?”

Finn nods, seemingly unsurprised that a nun from a school he was in as a child hasn’t aged a day. She looked down at the gallery guide she’d swiped on the way in the room. The artist died of an infected burn in 1851.

"You and Father Cassian," Finn smiles fondly. "I remember you two. The way you looked at each other. It just...redeemed faith. As a kid, when you see that, it makes you remember how important it is, what to fight for. Even if you two never broke your vows and lived alongside each other in whatever bullshit chastity... Krennic couldn't stand it. That's when he made Cassian beat you at mass. He was obsessed..."

“Did you ever…” Jyn glances at the painting and then Finn again. There was never any proof of these lives intertwining before. The portrait and the student. “Poe? Did you ever find him?”

Finn leans back on the bench, his eyes older than Jyn would ever be. 

“Never did. All the records were destroyed when the damned place burned down in…”

“1967,” she whispers.

Cassian's face turns pale. "I need you to come with me. I know where Jyn is."

Poe doesn't even look surprised. Cassian was immediately jealous of him, because he believed.

**Author's Note:**

> So as I said, this is more Catholic Mythology than theology. You can't beat that Irish Catholic Upbringing out of me, and trust me, I've tried. God is dead but my irrepressible sense of shame is alive and kicking.


End file.
